


The Sadder But Wiser Girl

by simplyprologue



Series: Dustland Fairytales [2]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Blackouts, Canon Compliant, Episode 2.07, F/M, Hurricane Sandy, Romance, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 16:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1273144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>They had told the staff to get some sleep while maintenance worked to bring the generators back on, but Mac isn’t sleeping. (Neither is he, obviously.)</i> The answer to the question of why Will was waiting outside of Mac's meeting with the lawyers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sadder But Wiser Girl

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Well, I tried really hard to keep this under 5,000 words to prove to myself that I could do it and I failed but at least I kept it under what Meg thought it would wind up being, which is what really matters. 
> 
> I suppose this fic is the answer to a few questions, actually: Why was Will waiting for Mac while she was meeting with the lawyers? How does Will know Mac is so far gone in 2.08? Why has Will appointed himself director of morale? 
> 
> Title taken from the song from _The Music Man_ and used completely out of context.

It hurt, or was rather like a ringing numbness, when he figured out that she no longer took her coffee like she used to.

He remembers, of course, how she used to.

He could throw away a three-quarters-used bottle of perfume and a discarded blouse, missing a button, but he couldn’t strike how she took her coffee from his memory. Had merely allowed the pain and anger to eclipse that knowledge, until he was ready to know it again. But she doesn’t use milk anymore. Which he can acknowledge as making sense; that after twenty-eight months traipsing through a war zone, milk is an impracticality to her.

But she had so easily donned her designer shoes and chiffon blouses after coming home. Perhaps coffee was not something she needed to feel normal again. Perhaps she thought he had forgotten the minutia of her life, that she likes, had liked, her coffee with milk and two sugars first off, and then darker and bitterer from there on in.

He wonders what it means that she hasn’t corrected him any time that he’s brought her coffee in the past eight months.

Will doesn’t know why he’s thinking of that, now, at four in the morning while waiting for the generators to come back on in the AWM building. Sandy has knocked out most of lower Manhattan off the power grid, and now midtown appears to be slowly sinking into the Hudson.

They had told the staff to get some sleep while maintenance worked to bring the generators back on, but Mac isn’t sleeping.

(Neither is he, obviously.)

He knows that because her cell phone keeps lighting up sparse corners of her office, or _kept_ lighting up sparse corners of her office, which he knows because he’s been watching it for the past three or so hours to make sure that she’s all right.

He’d been occupying himself by writing his script for tomorrow by flashlight at one of the abandoned cubicles (it’s senior staff here, and some of the lower-level and interns and just about anyone who’s been flooded out, and right now they’re all sleeping in strewn-about air mattresses and sleeping bags), but he finally felt guilty about wasting battery life when it became apparent they’ve got hours until the lights come back on and it’s just being wasteful.

But he can’t sleep, either.

Not for lack of trying, but New York City wasn’t designed to withstand a hurricane.

At least not quietly.

Rain batters against the windows that wrap floor-to-ceiling around every floor in the AWM building, wind screeches outside, trying to claw a hold into the glass, and while Will logically understands that these windows are rated for these kinds of gusts, every so often some storm-tossed debris hits the side of the building and he swears that the whole thing threatens to cave in. Or so it seems. And he’s worried, about Mac, sitting in her office next to the windows, when he escaped into the bullpen, where it’s quieter, hours ago.

It’s possible that she’s gone to sleep, but that seems absurd.

She grew up partially in Greece and Turkey during the Aegean dispute and then in West Berlin in the years preceding to the destruction of the wall; she didn’t know what it was like to sleep in a place where violent conflict might not break out over crude oil or crudely-drawn borders until she was eighteen and back in the US for the first time in fourteen years.

Mac, who shipped herself out to Chechnya at twenty-three and slept in refugee camps, and then still hadn’t learned to sleep through the anxieties of fragile pockets of the world, had rather learned not to sleep at all.

They used to sit up together in bed, half naked or not clothed at all, pouring over notes and wire reports or just lying on their backs, arguing about US politics and foreign policy, and he’d spend breathless nights at her side, wondering how he had found someone he could spend twenty-four hours a day with and never get bored.

She used to call.

Until Nina.

And even now that that’s over, she doesn’t call.

He decides to get up and check on her, because now she doesn’t have a nightlight and he really thinks that she can’t sleep through this, but he’s not sure. The Green Zone is more than anything she put herself through before… maybe she learned to sleep through shellings and late-night bombings, and this is like how she takes her coffee without milk and possibly without sugar, and Will can’t fathom MacKenzie as a black coffee kind of woman and he’s starting to think that’s starting to be the root of a lot of their problems.

There’s no light at all, so he has to feel his way to her office, and traces his pointer finger over her name on the plaque next to her door before knocking on the glass. “Hey. It’s me.”

It feels like she’s racing past him, and she’ll be gone in two weeks without notice, without even leaving her office, if they both still have offices by that point.

He doesn’t know how to ask her not to leave him again.

For a moment, when she doesn’t respond, Will thinks she really might have fallen asleep, until he hears a deep sigh and then a quiet response.

“I thought you had crashed with the rest of them,” she answers, loud enough to be heard over the din but nothing more than that.

He shuffles awkwardly in the doorway, considering going in, but he knows she has an air mattress somewhere on the floor and he can’t see anything at all. “I thought you might have. Your light didn’t go on in a while.”

“My phone died,” she says on the tail-end of a sigh.  

“I have a flashlight, if you want—”

She cuts him off. “I’m fine.”

 _No, you’re not_ , he wants to say, but he can’t even tell her how she takes her coffee or how it feels like someone has concaved his insides and scooped out his nerves and inverted them, all because he can’t decide if the clothing she wears, the labels and carefully-constructed outfits, are now just the frontispiece to her ongoing play at normalcy, if the MacKenzie he loved six years ago exists at all, or if she’s been overwritten by someone he’s learning he doesn’t quite know as well as he’s had himself convinced.

He still loves her.

That’s what scares him; he knows this new woman, his best friend and most trusted partner, even if at moments she is strange to him, bending and blunting her edges to play his games, shrink from his barbs, fitting, even still.

“Even if—the light doesn’t make it—it’s hard to explain,” she says, rushing out consonants and it almost sounds like she’s afraid, and he wishes he could see her, because now that he can’t see if her arms are crossed under her chest or if her chin is dipping, he wants to touch her. “It’s childish, really. I’m fine.” She sighs again. “I told Jim to sleep while he could. He sat with me for a bit.”

“You could have come to get me.”

“Could I?” Then she laughs at herself a little, the sound sharpening into something self-deprecating, and he trips over his feet into her office. “I’m sorry, that was—”

“Honest?” he finishes for her. He knows that she stopped calling for a reason.

Mac snorts. “I was going to say ‘uncalled for.’”

“It wasn’t.” He toes around her air mattress, trying to find the front of her desk. She probably shouldn’t be sitting in here, at least, not alone. But, he supposes, all the quieter parts of the building—the stairwells, the studio, the control room—have all been claimed as sleeping spaces. “And I wouldn’t have minded.”

“You need sleep,” she replies, exasperated in the way that he knows means that she’s exhausted, and frayed at the edges, and he considers backing off.

But he doesn’t.

“So do you.”

She barks a pointed laugh. “Its… its fine, Jim understands.” He doesn’t, because she’s not making any particular kind of sense, and he stares down at approximately where her voice is coming from, feeling unease creep up the length of his spine. “I would have had to—it’s fine.”

“Had to what, Mac?”

She needs to sleep, he thinks. Doesn’t know _how_ he’s going to get her to sleep, but she needs it. Has needed it for two months, really, but none of them have slept since Genoa, but the first round of depositions from the outside counsel start in a few days, and he knows, he _knows_ how that’s going to set off all of Mac’s neuroses. She won’t sleep. She’ll just keep working until everything’s perfect, like she’s always done, except there’s no way for her to get to perfect. Not now. Not after what they’ve done.

And it’ll be worse, because she thinks that Genoa was one hundred percent her fault, and Will knows in a week or two she’ll be at the end of what she can endure, three years in the Middle East or not.

“There’s a lot—it was—almost three years, and I’d have to explain, and it’s just easier, because Jim was there and he understands.” She takes in a gulp of air, exhaling slowly before trying to reroute her sentence, but he still doesn’t know what she’s trying to tell him. He knows things happened to her, overseas, but she never talks about them. They don’t… that’s not a part of their relationship. “And I don’t exactly,” she continues, before pausing again. “I have Xanax, its fine.”

He thinks she’s afraid.

(And she’s not the only one; he can’t sleep either. But his isn’t so much fear as a survival instinct recklessly formed, broad and imprecise, developed too young to be cast aside and him too old to be forced into abandoning it.

He knows it’s the same imprecise instinct that keeps him from forgiving MacKenzie, on the days where he can admit to himself that she deserves forgiveness.)

“The hurricane’s not just going to go away, Mac,” is what he finally says, instead of offering anything helpful, anything of himself or anything to her.

The noise she makes is a strangled one, distinctly frustrated. “No shit.”

A piece of debris off the road, or perhaps a particularly strong gust of wind, sheet of rain, _something_ , hits the window with a sudden resounding shriek of a sound, high and reverberating, and Mackenzie, while she doesn’t make a single noise, sends things clattering from her desk, skittering across the wood surface and onto the floor.

“Fuck!”

He stoops to feel around for whatever crashed off the front of her desk, trying to figure out what to say to her. The storm outside is too loud for him to hear her coming around the other side of the desk, and when he finds her arm instead of whatever it was, he almost jerks his hand away, before—

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m _fine_.”

She tries to take her hand away, but he’s already folded his fingers around hers, but they don’t tessellate anymore. Their edges have been honed and molded, and Will realizes he doesn’t quite remember how to hold her, can’t decide if it’s because she’s changed or if it’s because he has.

But that’s on her, not him.

It’s not his fault that he doesn’t know how she takes her coffee.

 _She_ left.

“Where’s your Xanax?” he asks, instead, trying to get her to abandon the search for the picture frame or paper clip holder or what the fuck ever.

“I already took it.”

He almost scoffs at her. “You’re shaking.”

“Oh my God, Will!” she exclaims, giving up on getting him to let go of her and sitting back. “You of all people should know you can’t medicate everything away.”

“Okay, angrily pushing people away is my thing, and I’m not letting you encroach upon my thing.”

He pulls her back away from the desk—because honestly there could be broken glass or something and he’s not fumbling through the darkness to find the first aid kit because then they’d both probably be injured—trying to ignore her dry, humorless laugh.

“And what I am supposed to do? What’s my ‘thing?’” she asks, letting him tow her a few feet away, but nothing more. The muscles of her forearm and wrist keep tensing and relaxing under his grip, and she’s keeping herself suspended away from him on purpose.

(He half wants to pull her into his lap, but he won’t, for reasons more than not knowing how she’d respond.)

“You’re the one who’s supposed to give the optimistic, rallying speeches while I stand off in the corner and radiate pessimism,” he says, trying to be funny.

Something hits the window again and he feels her very deliberately not flinch towards him, lurching momentarily towards him, her limbs following like a wave of energy hurtling forward before stopping, pulling back.

And it doesn’t hurt, that she stops; it’s the ringing numbness again, vibrating faster and faster in frequency until its anxiety and fear.

MacKenzie can’t hurt him anymore.

“How will you survive such a role reversal?” she asks, more exhausted than bitter, and the acrid taste of foreboding begins to dissipate in his mouth.

He tries to laugh, but can’t quite manage it. “I can try my hand at being director of morale for a bit.”

“We’re better off installing suicide nets off the side of the building,” she mumbles, dropping from her knees into a sitting position.

“Hey!” he says, giving her a cursory protest; but he feels her tensing again, feels himself stiffening in response. He can’t see her, but she’s his EP. She’s in his ear five nights a week; he should be able to read her voice better than he is right now. She should be the one having trouble. “I’ve done rallying speeches.”

“That were carefully scripted and pre-planned,” she counters quietly, voice creeping along the blunt side of antagonism.

“The night we got Osama wasn’t carefully scripted or pre-planned—”

“You were high!” she retorts, like she would say _are you fucking kidding me?_

“I could—”

“No,” she cuts him off, punctuating the end of this part of the conversation. She’s tired. He thinks that she’s tired, and she has to be. She hasn’t slept in two days, really. And even though Mac can deal with sleep deprivation better than anyone else in the newsroom…

He realizes that at some point they’ve shifted into holding hands, sitting next to each other on the floor. Not him holding her wrist, but their fingers laced together, her thumb moving absently over the knot of bone from when he broke his hand when he was fourteen.

With the skin stretched over her palm pressed up against his, he can feel how cold her hand is.

He affords her a few moments of silence.

“Are you cold?”

“What?”

He squeezes his fingers into hers. “Your hand is freezing.”

“My hands are always cold,” she answers, fingers going lax in his.

Does she think he doesn’t remember?

“I know that,” Will answers softly, blinking into the black, remembering the row of little orange bottles in her medicine cabinet, the strange cadence of her heart, which he somehow misses more than most things, because it can’t be replicated or reproduced; he can’t close his eyes and pretend someone else is her. “Because of the mitral valve, but—what I’m saying is it’s pretty cold in here with the heat off, you’re shaking, your hands are like blocks of ice, and you’ve just been sitting, so you being cold is a logical conclusion.”

“Fine, I’m _cold_ ,” she responds, voice flaring. Irate, in an attempt to not get upset. He knows that much.

“You have a sleeping bag right here, you know,” he tells her, knowing it’s probably the wrong thing to say but he thinks he’s probably been telling the Mac the wrong thing for years now.

“Being cold is easier—it’s—and I don’t feel—”

“Don’t feel what?” he asks, cutting her off, keeping her from having to gather the threads. She’s tired, and anxious; it’s not fair of him to expect her to…

“The only times we really got hurt is when we’d get trapped in the tents,” she explains carefully. “In our bedding. And then there’d be shells coming through the windows or over the walls and it was just… _easier_ , for me, to sleep sitting up sometimes.”

“The windows aren’t going to break.”

_And you’re not sleeping at all._

“You think I don’t know that?” she snaps.

“Not, that’s not…” He concedes, mentally, that it probably came across as condescending. “I know irrational fears. Trust me. I understand it. I just… come on.”

He takes his hand out of hers (“Oh, sorry, I—” and then he realizes she thinks he wanted his hand back, and he shushes her) and pulls his sweatshirt over his head, and hands it to her.

“Oh, I couldn’t—”

Will sighs. “I know there are at least three I didn’t get back, after we—just take it.”

He used to be resentful of it, almost. He knows which three, too. A ratty University of Nebraska sweatshirt that was about ten years old when they starting dating that she adopted all the same, a Columbia Law Alumni zip-up that she’d more often than not be wearing absolutely nothing underneath, and an old ACN sweatshirt that had been washed into oblivion and consigned to the apartment, and fell to her mid thighs.

He wonders if she kept them.

He threw things away without looking at them. All that was spared in his war of attrition against all of his good memories of MacKenzie was a single white lace camisole, the straps of which he remembered, too vividly for indifference, sliding off her shoulders while they kissed. He turned away harder after that, sparing not a single thought for what he tossed away, lest he linger over another item, press another trace of longing for her into his skin, and fold it carefully away.

“But then you’ll get cold.”

“Doubtful.” He almost reminds her that she used to call him a fucking furnace with differing levels of affection, depending on the season.

“Billy,” she protests, but lets him shove the sweatshirt into her hands. He hears the quiet rustling of fabric against fabric when she pulls it over her head.

 _Take the damn thing_ , he almost says, almost annoyed. “I’m fine. Now come on,” he orders, trying to pull her over to where he knows her air mattress is.

“What?”

“Sleeping bag.”

He can imagine the face she’s making at him right now.

“Did you not listen to a single word—?”

Scoffing, he begins to laugh. “I think you know that sometimes people need to be forced out of bad habits for their own good, so get under the damn sleeping bag, crazy lady, and warm up.”

“Are you referring to your—?”

“Yes.” Because thank god she’s been there to drag him off his ass for the past three years, so he owes her at least this much, especially since she’s so dead-set on making Genoa her fault, because she’s never slept well without a light on, and because he doesn’t know how she takes her goddamn coffee anymore. “Now come on, MacKenzie. It’s, well, I can’t see my watch, but probably past 4:30 in the morning. You need to sleep.”

“You do too,” she asserts, but lets him push and prod her onto the air mattress, and he thinks he hears her shoes thunking onto the carpet, before she reaches out blindly for him and pulls him closer.

“I—”

She rolls her eyes, audibly, manipulating him so he has to move to keep his bad knee from collapsing, pulls him down beside her. “I think we can handle—”

“What?”

“I’m just saying, we are adults.”

And friends.

(Best friend, most trusted partner.)

She sounds far more fragile than he’d like at the moment, her brief moment of confidence diminished, and a disquiet follows. _Why didn’t you tell me you don’t take your coffee the same way anymore?_ The question lingers behind his teeth, pressing to get out. The words can hide in the dark. Will knows how well things can hide in the dark, under the roar of a storm.

Her curves are rounder, limbs more muscular, and he has remind himself that he can’t hold onto the shape of the woman she was six years ago, he can only help who she is now, that expecting her to be the same after all this time would be… she’s just not. They can’t just lock into place, act like they haven’t forgotten how to, in some ways.

But her head remembers how to tuck into his shoulder, and he remembers how to curve his arm under her neck so that it doesn’t fall asleep, toes off his shoes and kicks them off the air mattress, and they figure out the rest.

Limbs laid out alongside his, she still shakes, fingers clenching into his tee shirt when the wind whips up. In miniscule increments, she shifts until her face is buried in his neck, until an arm is wrapped tightly around his waist. He pulls the sleeping bag (unzipped so it can fit over both of them) higher, before cradling the base of her skull in his palm.

“I don’t know what it is,” she whispers, spared having to raise her voice with her mouth so close to his ear.

Her breath is warm against his collar.

“Hm?”

She shakes her head, before trying to clarify, hand bunching up in his tee shirt before smoothing out the folds in her fabric. He doesn’t remember her doing that, before. “If it’s the noise, or the fact that I can’t see. I don’t know.”

“Or because you don’t know if it’s going to come through your door,” he says, before correcting himself. It was John coming through the door, betrayal after betrayal on an ever-turning wheel. “Window,” more the like, for her. “Roof.”

Her fingers trail down his ribs. “What?”

“Anxiety. It’s the uncertainty, but the definite possibility that the worst may happen. Because it has happened. So you train yourself for the worst, and it becomes instinct. And then it fucks you over.”

“Will?” she asks, not confused, but questioning.

He doesn’t mind. He knows he’s rarely this lucid about mental health.

“I did _use_ to go to therapy,” he says, trying to insert some brevity into the conversation, stroking her hair. “Not long enough to get rid of the instinct, but I did go long enough to learn that much. And I’m just… you’re not the only one who has problems. You’re not… alone.” Six years ago he would have kissed her head, the bridge of her nose, trailing his mouth along the contours of her face to her own lips. Instead, he combs her hair through his fingers, neither of them moving any more than that. “Anyone else would be bothered by the storm. And the power going out. For you it’s enough to make your brain think, even if you’re trying to rationalize yourself out of… we’ve never really talked about it.”

She stiffens. “I always thought you never wanted to, since…”

“It doesn’t bother me,” he answers quickly. He’s Mac’s friend. He should start acting like it. If he’s going to be her friend, he’s going to stop being so fucking hung up over his own shit that he can’t help her with her own. So she knows she can come to him. “Not that that should… and I know you have Jim, but if you need someone to talk to… not that you _have_ to.”

He feels her nod into his chest.

And then she doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, and Will hopes, somewhat dimly, that she’s fallen asleep.

But she hasn’t.  

“Other people got used to it,” she explains, quietly and carefully. “Jim did. I think I just got used to sleep deprivation. And by then, I had lost—I had lost some people. By the time we landed in Islamabad after the Green Zone and the rest of it... I don’t think I had slept in six months, and I was so tired.”

“Islamabad. And the religious riots. And then you got—”

“You heard about that?” she asks, lifting her chin.

He doesn’t tell her that he had her name set to google alerts on-and-off for three years, or that he half-considered booking a flight to Germany, or that he was in the room when Charlie picked up the phone and called her hospital room five days after it happened, and put her on speaker.

He doesn’t tell her that he never stopped loving her, and that’s why it bothers him that he noticed this morning that Jim brought her coffee without milk and she said _thank you_ and drank it easily. He doesn’t tell her that he’s angry at himself that he doesn’t notice these things about her, doesn’t tell her that he’s angry at her for leaving him in the first place.

She needs him to be her friend right now.  

“Once CNN released the name of the reporter who had been attacked,” he _does_ tell her, coaxing her head back down against his shoulder.

The wind hastens against the glass again, high-pitched and loud, holding out for over a minute during which Mac just groans and buries her face in his shirt, pulling the sleeping bag up over her head.

He keeps carding his fingers through her hair (that feels the same, smells the same, somehow, even though that shouldn’t make sense because he’s not stupid, no one uses the same shampoo for six years, so maybe it’s her perfume, MacKenzie’s always worn Fracas, like one of her aunts), trying to ignore that her weight on him makes the air mattress bearable, trying to ignore that Mac tends to make a lot of things bearable.

(It’s 5 AM and a lot of thoughts are slipping through, unbidden.)

He needs to know that he can do the same for her. That he’s not just…

“Do you think Maggie’s going to be okay?” she murmurs, once it quiets down a bit. “Talking with the lawyers?”

“I don’t know.”

Maggie walked into the newsroom two days ago with her hair cut off and a different color and he and Mac just looked at each other from across the newsroom. Something’s going to have to give with Maggie, and he knows they’re both worried it’s going to be meeting with the lawyers. Terrified, really, because they’re trying to save Maggie’s job, save everyone’s jobs, except their own, really, and they don’t know if they can save _Maggie_.

Mac’s been trying, he knows.

But he also knows that _he_ stopped going to therapy for three-and-a-half years.

“Are you?” he asks.

She laughs—only a little, and not very convincingly. “I have lived... through worse.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Well, you and Don probably _will_ antagonize the lawyers enough for the rest of us,” she says, laughing a little more, the sound less hollow this time.

“Hey!”

Mac snorts, shifting against him until her leg is hooking into one of his. “Please, you still haven’t learned how to place nice with other counsel. And if you say ‘ninety-four percent conviction rate’ I’ll hit you.”

“Fine, I won’t.” He traces the dip of her waist with his fingers until she squirms, batting his hand down to her hip. “You’re going to be fine, Mac. It’s gonna be okay.”

(It’s probably not going to be. He knows institutional failure when he sees it, but it’s not all MacKenzie’s fault, and he’s not going to be okay if she thinks that she has to assume one hundred percent of the burden.

He’s terrified, really. Because he knows that he, and Mac, and Charlie are going to have to resign a week from now. And he knows he’ll see Charlie, but he can’t trust that Mac is not just going to walk out of his life again. He doesn’t know how many rooms he’s going to have to sit outside of to get her to stay.

But he has a week to do it.)

“It’s inevitable,” he says mindlessly.

Mac tenses around him, burrowing her nose into his shoulder before easing herself away. “No, it’s not.”

“What?”

She sighs, and he can tell, even without being able to see her, that she’s berating herself for opening her mouth.

“ _What_ , Mac?”

He tightens his arm around her when she tries to roll onto her back.

“Mac.”

“It’s just—” She exhales, a measured, annoyed breath. “If I’ve learned nothing else, it’s that nothing is inevitable. We make our choices. And in the end, we are those choices. To say that something is inevitable is… it’s lazy. It’s an excuse.”

“Are you talking about Genoa, or us?”

“Both. And other things.” She pauses, trying to pull away, and he can’t read her face so he can’t tell if it’s unconscious or deliberate. “Both.”

He sinks his fingers into her hair again, because it works, it’s always worked, has always gotten her to relax against him.

“Mac, it’s—”

“Don’t tell me it’s going to be fine,” she snaps, before rubbing her hand over her forehead, eventually letting him pull her back down. “We both—tell the staff whatever you’d like, but we both know it’s not going to be fine.” She hesitates. “You and I are going to be out of here after Election Day.”

He doesn’t know why he asks her what he does, after that, more than just a few minutes later.

“How do you like your coffee?”

“What?” she asks, groggy, and he feels a pang of guilt when he realizes she was starting to fall asleep.

“Sorry, it’s not—”

She sighs. “ _What_ , Will?”

“Earlier,” he begins, understanding how stupid he probably sounds but plowing ahead anyway. “Jim brought you coffee. No milk. And I’ve been bringing you coffee for months with—”

“What does it matter?”

He doesn’t tell her because he can’t forgive her but he also can’t stand not knowing her better than anyone else.

“Why didn’t you correct me?”

“Because it—” Mac starts, trying to find her bearings before softening her voice, depleting it of the defensive edge that it had moments before. “I’ll drink coffee however. I’m not picky about it anymore.” She pauses before continuing, shrugging against him. “I stopped drinking it with milk while embedded because we had a couple of months in Peshawar where we’d be driving in the caravans every morning in Humvees and if I had it I’d get nauseous, so that’s how Jim learned to make coffee for me. Without milk. With two sugars.” Another pause, hesitating rather than thinking, this time. “I like that you remember how I used to take it.”

He lowers his hand from her hair to her neck, pressing the pads of his fingers into the junctures of her shoulders and her neck, massaging light circles into the muscle until her back muscles loosen her arms and legs.

“A lot of things matter a lot less to me now,” she tries to explain, more unsure of herself than he’d want. “And a few things matter a lot more.”

He finds that he doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. “Oh.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she murmurs.

“Are you falling asleep?”

She tries to adjust her head so her face isn’t pressed against him. “I think the Xanax is—sorry—”

“No, that’s good,” he says, trailing the palm of one hand up and down the bend of her spine until she unwinds herself again. “Go to sleep.”

“What if you need to get up?” she mumbles.

He snorts. “Go to sleep, MacKenzie.”

“You’re warm,” she says, in the high-pitched, airy way she has moments before slipping into unconsciousness. A few more seconds, and then her breathing evens out.

Will figures they have a few more hours until the generators are fixed.

And he probably won’t sleep at all. Not with Mac practically on top of him.

She’ll still take her coffee how she used to, and he doesn’t quite know how to feel. That seems to be the theme, lately. Because he knows that when it comes down to it, it’s going to be MacKenzie. But he can’t get himself to forgive her, and he has no right to ask her to stay, and the clock’s ticking down, and something, _something’s_ going to have to give.

But for now, the power’s out and none of the clocks are moving, so he holds her while she sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
